Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I believe any website that is behind the walled garden should be deindexed by Google and other search engines. Whether it's a newspaper, Q/A websites, social media, or anything else. It's only fair. When users search for something, they should only get results of web pages whose content is accessible to all without having to sign up for an account.


Ideally Google would have a search filter that lets you block paywalled sites from your search, if that's what you want.


You've got it backwards I think, google should offer you a search filter to include paywalled sites while they are by default excluded.

The vast majority of the time, someone searching something on the internet isn't willing to pay to see it.


I've wondered recently if this simple (but powerful) feature would be enough of a differentiator for a search engine challenger to gain serious market share.

Imagine if Duck Duck Go offered that by default?


There are several such differentiators:

- exclude walled gardens

- exclude sites with ads and/or ecommerce

- exclude sites with tracking

- exclude sites with fixed headers

- allow users to have personal blocklists

As a bonus, if you make a new search engine offering such options, existing search engines will be afraid to copy them.


Google should be returning the highest quality results. If thats a paywalled newspaper, it should not be excluded.

However, I do think some kind of tag, similar to [AD] could appear next to the result, warning you not to click it, [PW] or [LW] for paywall and loginwall.


I don't consider anything that's pay-walled to be high quality. If I can't read it, it has no value to me.


What do you consider high-quality?


operative word: i.


A lot of search is searcher context sensitive, so I don't think automating this is unreasonable


If I continue to run into the same paywall, I would consider buying into it. If I bought content, I would want it to show up in search. I wouldnt know I want to buy it, if I dont run into it first.


Then Google should work on a way to connect your purchase with their system or give you ability to inform them you’ve purchased a subscription so that only you get to see search results from that paywalled website, and not others.


In that case they should return book results also, which are usually the highest quality.


a result is low quality if i can't view the content of it.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: